Haas owner Gene Haas is now assessing the team’s future in Formula 1 having been briefed on the new 2021 regulations.
The American outfit is the newest on the grid, having only joined in 2016, but despite solid midfield success initially, has struggled to make further progress up the grid.
Over the past year, questions over their finances have also been raised as they already have the lowest budget on the grid and recently lost title sponsor Rich Energy after a tenuous nine-month partnership.
And with the challenge that will come for preparing for 2021, Haas now have to decide if they want to commit to F1.
“I talked him through everything because he’s in California and I’m in North Carolina so we’d rather speak face-to-face rather than over the phone,” team boss Guenther Steiner told RACER, referring to a meeting at the US Grand Prix.
“I gave him all the information and talked him through everything so now he needs to digest everything because when I speak for a long time, we get confused.
“It was all positive. It was just bringing him up to speed and it was much easier to do that (in Austin). We came in on Saturday and I spent more than two hours with him and [on Sunday morning] it wasn’t too long.
“But on Saturday it was a long time because I had to talk him through everything, explaining the new commercial agreement and all that stuff. It’s normal.”
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Haas made their impact in F1 by adopting a unique model which sees them buy-in many of their components from Ferrari in a technical partnership as well as outsource chassis development to Dallara.
That has riled up many of their midfield rivals, including the likes of McLaren and Williams who use the traditional model, and it was suggested efforts would be made to make what has been dubbed the ‘B-team’ model less desirable.
However: “Very little changes. The business model change is very little,” Steiner said via Crash.net when asked what the agreed regulations meant for Haas.
“I think we are OK, some of the parts which before we bought, now they will be standard parts. I have no problem. We negotiated it with them, and they came up with them.
“The brake ducts, they will be the same for everybody, so instead of buying them from Ferrari, everybody has got the same brake duct.
“There are changes, and it changes a little bit for us, but we agreed to it beforehand. We are not like, ‘Woah, they didn’t tell us that!’ If we would have had an opinion not to do it, we would have come up before.”
The appeal of the 2021 regs isn’t the only factor for Gene Haas to consider though, as a tough 2019 has left the team trailing down the order.
“I mean, the biggest problem he has is with our performance,” the team boss admitted. “Who is impressed with the state of F1 if you don’t make money out of it? It’s a big investment.
“I think he has to digest everything and then see what he wants to do. But he’s not negative about it, he’s just like every good businessman, he has to rethink what to do but he is not negative about it.
“For sure he has doubts like everybody else and it’s something new, but it’s normal business.”